This turned out to be a central question during the EBTA (European Brief Therapy Association) conference in Bern, Switzerland, this weekend.

Receiving his award for distinguished contribution to SF thinking, Luc Isabaert said, 'There is no orthodoxy in SF thinking. Steve de Shazer was a heterodox thinker, a man of science and philosophy. And Insoo was a practitioner.'

Sometimes coaching will succeed only if your client can get to grips with aspects of their issues that are tricky to put into words. For example, one client was describing her goals, and mentioned a feeling that she said she wanted to experience more often - a feeling of intense connection to the universe.

She'd had this feeling, she recalled, once or twice over the previous few years, but she found it difficult to say more about it.

Getting this feeling described was important, as we shall see. Yet doing so was an intricate process; we were trying to pin down something subtle, elusive and frustratingly ephemeral.